My papers

Saturday, June 5, 2010

Week 9 : May 31- June 6

End, end, end... everything is ending sometimes...
I like the words by our friend Khang from Vietnam, that time flies, while we are walking...
These nine weeks were very informative for us. We've got new ideas, new knowledge, we found new friends!!! Almost everybody is going to share his or her new knowledge with other teachers. They are going to conduct seminars and trainings, print books or create on-line books. And to my mind, it will be the best reflection after 10-week online course with Deborah and Universtity of Oregon.
Now I am finishing to create the Power Point presentation with all useful sites and links, which we were working during last weeks.
One of the most important things at our course is -our TECHNOLOGY-ENHANCED PROJECT. We were working with our project since our second week of the course and even don't think about any diffuculties or problems (except project report - but thanks to Bulent and Nadina, even typing of report was a pleasure thing). By the way, the educational board of my district is very interested in my project and asked me to give them copy of my report.In fact we all were involved in technology project - we used Nicenet class, Google-site, Snapgrade evaluation, Delicious bookmark and other useful sites. And now, it seems that we knew all these tools for many years.

This week was very practical. Deborah gave us a lot of wonderful sites, which contain very useful tools for creation worksheets, quizzes , crosswords, grammar activities etc.

I have created my own Nicenet class for my future 10th grade students. According to the national curriculum we have 8 topics for learning in the 10th class, so I’ve created discussions for each topic of the future academic year, and in September I’ll present our new virtual class to my students.

Also, I’ve created the Google-site for my elder students from different classes. Next year I’ll have third, eighth, ninth and tenth grades, so my site is addressed to all students, where I will post all news and interesting tasks.

A new discovery for me this week was HOT POTATO program. At the beginning of our course Nadina has already told about it, but the setup file, which I’ve downloaded didn’t work, but this wee I tried Russian version, not English and it was OK, and I’ve created a simple activity about shopping. There are two variants of using hot potato activities – at the home browser and in the Internet, if you upload it to www.hotpotato.net .Now I understand why everybody is so excited in his or her posts at Nicenet about using hot potato.

Besides creation of the on-line activities, we have some site for creation paper worksheets and other materials. Well, it is mainly for the beginner level of learners, but there are a lot of different opportunities. I like www.123listening.com, where you can download ready-to –use audio and worksheets for them in various topics. And site www.123certificates.com I have used before, here isa picture of my second grade students at their last lesson, after they got the certificates from www.123certificates.com.

your students are great, and rewarding them is also great and motivating for them. As this week we are ending school too, I am thinking about giving my 9th graders a certificate, to reward their endeavours this school year.

Dear Ruslana,It is nice when you give certificates. Your students seem happy carrying their certificates. I like to give certificates designed by me, but certificates from 123certificates are very nice. I use them sometimes.

HOT POTATO is a very interesting program. I have tried it before and I gave a workshop for other teachers in my school. They enjoy it.